A new quality of life plan has launched in Garfield Park, aiming to coalesce residents of East Garfield Park and West Garfield Park around shared goals for future investment.
The Garfield Park Rite to Wellness Collaborative, a resident-led group working to improve the health, safety and economic opportunity of its neighborhood, unveiled a quality of life plan on Sept. 17 at the Sankofa Village Wellness Center at 4305 W. Madison St. Over 1,500 people helped shape the plan through a process supported by Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), which helps align public and private investments in neighborhoods.
The quality of life plan is built around nine pillars: Arts, media and technology; business and economic development; education and workforce development; health and wellness; housing, real estate and green space; parent and family support; public safety; recreation and entertainment; and youth development.
“Releasing the plan part was a big, audacious goal that we have completed. Implementation seems very doable against that, which I’m very proud of, because it speaks to the role of the collaborative as a convener,” said Drea Slaughter, executive director of Garfield Park organization.
Working groups have already outlined strategies to achieve the plan’s goals in those nine areas and identified local organizations that are already working towards those goals.
“We’ve already had some early wins as it relates to cityscaping and green spaces,” Slaughter said, like repaving roads outside Sankofa Village Wellness Center. She added that many of the plan’s goals will be implemented simultaneously.
Jaime Arteaga, senior program officer at LISC, said that implementing the plan depends a lot on outside factors beyond the Garfield Park Rite to Wellness Collaborative’s control.
“Opportunities present themselves at different times, so you just have to be ready, either to create the opportunity yourself or take advantage of opportunities presented,” Arteaga said. “We’re talking short-term, medium-term, and long-term when we’re talking about implementation.”
LISC is launching an implementation cohort, where organizations that have launched quality of life plans can compare experiences. The Garfield Park Rite to Wellness Collaborative will host the inaugural implementation cohort meeting.
“We wanted to bring some of our core partners together to share implementation challenges and successes, so they can learn from each other. Because hearing from us is one thing, but hearing from their colleagues who are engaged in the same work is something different,” Arteaga said. “We try to support where possible, and sometimes that means getting out of the way,” he added of LISC’s role moving forward with the quality of life plan. “They call the play and we run it.”
Additionally, the Garfield Park Rite to Wellness Collaborative will host quarterly check-ins with captains of working groups and annual convenings to discuss the status of their strategies and the overall plan.
Slaughter said that what she’s most looking forward to about the quality of life plan is the point when the community can move beyond implementing basics like grocery stores and safe gathering spaces.
“I’m looking forward to this neighborhood being able to dream,” Slaughter said, “as opposed to a plan that is centered around so many necessities.”
“I just want to see where we’re able to drive this and what we’re able to create that lives on beyond us,” Slaughter added. “I do feel like this is a legacy thing, and that we want to create a really strong foundation that anyone behind us can build on top of, instead of something that’s ripped up, broken down and needs to constantly be replaced.”
Unifying Garfield Park, crafting the plan
Slaughter said the last quality of life plan in the area was for East Garfield Park in 2005.
“West [Garfield Park] wasn’t necessarily completely left out, but it was very East Garfield Park centered,” Slaughter said of the plan. “I just remember thinking, ‘When did it split?’ As someone who grew up here, I don’t remember. It was always Garfield Park. It was never East and West.”
In 2014, East Garfield Park saw the Large Lot Program, where homeowners and nonprofits could buy vacant lots on their block for $1. And the neighborhood’s proximity to the West Loop allowed it to develop a unique housing stock, Slaughter said. The nonprofit Breakthrough is also based in East Garfield Park, where it provides affordable housing, a women’s shelter, and the FamilyPlex community center.
“All these things were positioned to drive that area in a similar way that we’re doing for all of Garfield Park, but West specifically,” Slaughter said. “Right now, there’s a greater need in West Garfield Park, which is why we’re positioned here. Some community members felt [the quality of life plan] needed to be inclusive as a form of unification. The whole Garfield Park needs to heal. The whole Garfield Park needs to experience this amazing renaissance that’s happening.”
The process to create the Garfield Park quality of life plan started in 2022, when the Garfield Park Rite to Wellness Collaborative won the Pritzker Traubert Foundation’s Chicago Prize. The $10 million funded the Sankofa Wellness Village, “which was inclusive of several different projects, which all uniquely were centered to affect the death gap and improve the quality of life of Garfield Park residents,” Slaughter said.
In West Garfield Park, life expectancy is about 66 years, and Chicago’s average is closer to 78 years, according to the collaborative.
To address the life expectancy gap, the Sankofa Wellness Center opened in April to offer primary healthcare. But the Sankofa Wellness Village also includes The K entrepreneurial business hub, the MAAFA Center for Arts & Activism, and the Community Grocer Initiative, an effort to bring healthy food to West Garfield Park.
Also in 2022, the Garfield Park collaborative began hosting community vision meetings, interviewing residents and commissioning a corridor analysis for the Madison-Pulaski business district. The following year, the collaborative brought in LISC, which has developed 31 quality of life plans in Chicago.
“The engagement and the intentional-ness of the way that Drea [Slaughter] and the team engaged the community was really thoughtful and something that happens in a lot of communities, but the engagement was deeper than what we’ve experienced in the past,” Arteaga said. “When you don’t center residents and you don’t take the time to engage them and be thoughtful on what types of projects and amenities they would like to see in communities, you have development happen to residents as opposed to development happening with residents.”
Including community members in discussion and organizing, Slaughter said, makes it so people go from being residents to being neighbors, creating connectivity that adds to quality of life.
“Inclusion of community is the crux of any successful plan,” Slaughter said. “If they’re along for the ride, they identify themselves through it and then they’re reflected in it. That’s the greatest investment, and they’re a part of it as opposed to it happening to them.”